This week, Epic Games announced its plans to unveil the latest Unreal Engine 3 upgrades at the upcoming Game Developers Conference at the end of March. Unreal Engine 3 is the third generation of Epic Game's Unreal Engine designed for DirectX 9/10 PCs, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This is a very popular engine for developers, being used in games such as Bioshock, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Gears of War 2, Mirror's Edge and numerous other titles.

The developer invites conference participants to visit their booth where they will be demonstrating some of the new engine features along with details regarding their massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) environment. Members of Epic Games' development team will also be speaking at different sessions throughout the conference.

Some of the new upgrades to be showcased include Unreal Lightmass, a new global illumination solver that produces superior static lighting with next generation effects. A new content browser and search engine will also be unveiled allowing designers to easily locate game assets without having to manually open up files to find them. Another feature to be shown is the Unreal Master Control Program or MCP. This service architecture is used to power online community elements and will now be available as a general feature of Unreal Engine 3. This online infrastructure is already being used in games such as Gears of War 2.